Beyond Crysis: Crytek Talks CryENGINE 2's Future

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For those who hate reading, we've also uploaded a fancy tech demo video.

By Jason Ocampo

Take the engine that powered last year's dazzling (and resource heavy) Crysis and put it in the hands of other developers and what do you get? That's the question that Crytek is looking to answer as it pushes into the business of providing middleware to other developers with its powerful CryENGINE 2 technology. What does CryENGINE have to offer, and can it work on the consoles? And what's up next for Crytek? We took those questions and more to Harald Seeley, the engine business manager for Crytek. As a treat, Crytek also gave us a video shown at this year's Game Developers Conference that demonstrates the powerful and flexibility of CryENGINE 2. The video is essentially a recreation of the 2005 Sony Bravia commercial that featured 250,000 brightly colored rubber balls bouncing their way down the steep hills of San Francisco. In the case of the CryEngine 2 demonstration, this time it's teapots.

We talked with Harald Seeley, Engine Business Manager for Crytek. According to Seeley, his role at Crytek is to, "is to manage the licensing and support team who are responsible for providing the CryENGINE 2 to third party developers."

IGN: What are Crytek's goals for the engine licensing business? Do you want to position CryENGINE as the primary alternative to the Unreal engine? In the past, it seemed like engine licensing was a secondary concern for Crytek.

Harald Seeley: We see ourselves as providing an alternative for high profile developers who want to produce AAA games without the need to first develop their own technology, and who want to be able to differentiate themselves from the many other game titles available out there. Developers who want to put all their time and energy into creating exciting gaming content, but who don't want their middleware tools and technology to hold back and limit their creative vision. We don't see ourselves as trying to compete with any other particular middleware provider, so much as we see ourselves as an alternative to the high risk course of developing an internal state of the art engine which will both be costly, and may fall short of expectations upon completion.

IGN: The CryENGINE is being shopped to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 developers. Are there many console games being built on the CryENGINE?

Harald Seeley: We provided a preview of our console work-in-progress to other developers at the Game Developers Conference recently. We have not yet provided our console engine or tools to any outside parties, as they are still under development. We have multiple studios and teams here at Crytek, and of course some of them are involved in developing games on those platforms.

IGN: Can you tell us who has licensed the engine thus far, for both PC and console games?

Harald Seeley: As this list is growing constantly, the best source for this information is our new website www.cryengine2.com. As I said before, we have not yet made our console version to anyone outside of Crytek. We want to be sure the console ports of the engine are stable, relatively bug free, and have adequate performance before inviting others to use them for their own games. Otherwise, any unforeseen delays or unexpected problems in our own development would impact our licensees as well as ourselves, and that's not a position we wanted to put ourselves or our licensees into.

IGN: What's the performance difference of the CryENGINE on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 compared to the PC? Are you able to tailor the engine to each platform?

Harald Seeley: Yes, we definitely tailor the engine specifically to each platform. More than just the difference in CPU and video hardware capabilities of PCs and consoles is at play here. So are the much smaller memory budgets we must work with, the lack of a hard disk on some models, and the acceptance requirements of the hardware vendors themselves. All have an effect on how we approach each version of the engine.

The surprising thing has been how well the consoles can perform visually, once this tailoring is in place. We expect the final outcome will result in games that look like they're running at high settings, or nearly high settings, on a PC. Actually, we found it as much or more challenging to address the memory limitations of the consoles when converting our current AI system, as we did while converting our rendering engine or physics system, which was not something you might have expected at the start.

IGN: Would you like to share any thoughts as to the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360? What about the Wii? Will we see CryENGINE 1 games on it, perhaps?

Harald Seeley: Well there is no doubt that porting our engine to the PlayStation 3 is the more challenging of our two ongoing conversion projects, but that works to our advantage in the end. We feel certain we have the ability to get the most that is possible out of that platform, and therefore PS3 games which run on our engine in the future will definitely stand significantly apart from other games that don't. We haven't seen a great deal of demand for third party engines for the Wii, the limited complexity of games which can be developed for that console also limits the need for the kind of sophisticated tools and middleware which we are known for. So I doubt we will be providing any engine technology for that console in the near term.

So many teapots.

IGN: What are the advantages of the CryENGINE for developers?

Harald Seeley: There are many advantages for a developer choosing to use the CryENGINE 2, chief among them that it was the most highly awarded game engine last year for both technical and artistic quality, and that it has been through the quality assurance process of a commercially shipping title, which was of course Crysis. But the biggest advantage lies in our associated tools, particularly the "what you see is what you play" Sandbox 2 editor, which together with the engine provides a very powerful platform for rapid game development. With this combination, there is no down time waiting for assets or builds to compile, or game executables to load. A developer can have an idea, quickly realize it in the editor, then immediately drop into the game to test it. Ideas can be tried out, then refined or discarded and replaced with new ones, almost as fast they occur to the designers.

IGN: In what ways has the CryENGINE evolved since Crysis? What improvements have been made? Have you focused on improving visual fidelity, performance, or both?

Harald Seeley: There have been so many improvements it's really hard to know where to start. Adding native support for DirectX 10 and Vista, re-working our multi-threading approach to support the latest multi-core processors, implementing our greatly expanded integrated physics system, adding a completely new animation system which seamlessly combines procedural and pre-recorded animations, and replacing much of the need for creating game-side C++ code and LUA scripts with the output of our visual flow graph editor, are just a few of the highlights. But of course, what everyone immediately notices is our new near-photorealistic renderer, which has completely eliminated the need for pre-baked light or shadow maps, and provides fully dynamic HDR lighting, soft shadows, sub-surface scattering and ambient occlusion, among other features, all in real time.